Morgan and Me

I believe I have mentioned Morgan Blem before: my friend, band-mate, and since recently, my roommate. He and I go way back, and early last year we began making music together. By now you may have guessed that this week’s blog post is not about a hot event or funky upcoming band. It’s about something much better: me.

Morgan is incredibly talented on the piano. He only began playing when he was thirteen years old and fell completely in love with it. Just seven years down the line and the man may as well be a professional musician. As you know about me, I have been singing for as long as I can remember. So early in 2018 Morgan and I decided to create a song together. Morgan had recorded music with others before, but I had little experience with the process. It didn’t take too long for us to come up with some simple lyrics, to which we created a melody and harmonies soon after. By the end of the day, we had recorded a full-length song, Morgan in charge of the instrumentation and harmonies and myself in charge of lead vocals.

Of course the editing process took a little longer – Morgan spent several days cutting and mixing and fixing, as well as recording several harmonies for the vocals and adding synths to the music. When everything was done, we proudly named it and posted it onto SoundCloud. It’s called Next to You, and you can give it a listen right here.

I remember how nervous I was: would people like it? Was it good enough? Did my vocals sound alright? To my amazement, views increased by the minute and the feedback we got was unreal. To date the song has 40k plays, which blows me away. I feel immensely proud, and believe me, the positive feedback was highly motivating.

We’ve recorded several more songs together since then, but none of them have been released as of yet. We do however plan to post our next song titled Work With Me relatively soon, so watch this space! It would be great to receive your feedback and support. If you’re feeling extra musical, go give my own SoundCloud account a look right here.

Morgan and I are not the next big thing in Cape Town. We don’t play gigs (yet) and we don’t have many songs to our name. Our pseudonym, too, is still in production. However we are two incredibly passionate and hardworking individuals expressing ourselves in our original, indie/pop music. When we immerse ourselves in lyric-writing we shut out the rest of the world, and focus only on what we have and want to say. Perhaps it’s corny, but I find the process incredibly therapeutic.

Go give our song a listen on SoundCloud and let me know what you think! Feel free to be honest. All criticism is constructive. Don’t be too nasty though – you might just find your name in my next blog post!